The Coat Route (24 page)

“The financial pressures,” he says, “were perhaps too much to bear.” And, he is, he’s afraid, something of a flirt.

We are headed for an early lunch at the home of Karl Sussmann, John’s friend, client, and former business associate. Karl, John has told me, is the grandson of Bertie Oldfield, the legendary Australian cricket player, who was as famous for his fastidious dress as he was for having his skull fractured in 1932 by a vicious “body line bowl”; the incident was the source, for a time, of a diplomatic chill between Australia’s and England’s cricket federations.

“When Karl turned twenty-one, Bertie asked me to make him a suit and to take him under my wing, to be a kind of style mentor for him,” John says, as he turns down a narrow driveway to a brick cottage with a peaked red-tile roof and a white-railed front porch. In the front yard, workers are laying a pathway. “Karl ended up joining the company, learned to cut trousers, and served as the company’s business manager.”

When Karl came into some money, he left the business. Since then, he has been a loyal client.

“I’ve made dozens of things for him over the years—suits,
overcoats, shirts, jackets, trousers,” John says. “He also has an incredible shoe collection—custom, from all the world-class makers. He polishes them every day.”

Karl Sussmann is a lean man in pressed tan pants and a navy cashmere V-neck, who radiates a yogi’s quiet intensity. Though he is welcoming, I sense that he is also someone who would not appreciate being interrupted while he is trimming the perfectly spherical potted topiary trees that border one side of the swimming pool in his landscaped rectangular back yard. His house, done in dove grays, gives off the same disciplined serenity. When lunch is served, we sit at a dining table that has been set with goblets, silver, large exotic-looking blooms, and gray damask linens. There is a chilled bottle of 2008 Savaterre Chardonnay on the table. It is eleven-forty in the morning.

I say something like “Nice napkins.”

“Aren’t they wonderful? They are so capacious. Great for tucking in,” he says. “They are from a Paris flea market. I bought them all.”

Over lunch, Karl gives me his carefully considered theories about clothing and style and
sprezzatura
—a kind of nonchalant dash perfected by Italians.

“There is a progression of sartorial knowledge,” he says. “Maybe you start with Corneliani or Brioni, then made-to-measure, then up the ramp to bespoke.

“Bespoke is as far away from fashion as you can get. I almost think of it as anti-consumerism. I don’t consume. Everything I purchase now is a keeper.”

After lunch, Karl walks us back past the topiaries and out to the front yard. The air is scented with the blue-green bite of eucalyptus. The bricklayers are still at work. We stand in the sun, looking at their progress.

“I am a particular person. I’m not trying to be difficult. But I do have Rock of Eye,” he says, referring to the expression used by tailors to describe the ability to know instinctively when something is right and true. “If you have it, you apply it in every aspect of life. For instance, the other day I looked at the path here, and I said to the workers, ‘That’s off by a full centimeter.’ And they measured it. I was right. It is a bit of a demon. You only see the flaws.”

On our way back to the city, John says, “There are six or seven kinds of bespoke customers. There are fanatics like Karl. They know what they want and they know I can make it. They come to me for the technical skills. They want the best quality, and they are very, very particular. They will count the stitches on a collar. I don’t know what makes them that way. Karl calls it a sickness. Some people really get addicted to it. They always have to have something new. It’s got nothing to do with clothing; it’s about not allowing themselves to be satisfied.

“Then there are people who see their tailors as people they can take their frustrations out on. They make totally unreasonable demands. I will do anything for someone who is genuine and passionate, but I have become very tough when I sense people are trying to use me or they are being unreasonable. They want things that are impossible. I mean, fabric is fluid; when you stand in a different position, it is going to look different.

“Other people come for traditional reasons—J. H. Cutler made for their fathers and grandfathers, so when it is time to get a suit, they come to me. Some come for a one-off—a wedding suit, father of the bride, or something for a special meeting, or maybe they have been saving up to get this one thing. I may never see them again.

“Then there are people who are label-conscious and snobby
about it. They act like ‘Look out. I’m wearing Cutler.’ I have even been asked to sew one of my Cutler labels into a coat on which I am only doing an alteration. They can’t afford it, but they want to show off. Of course, there are some people who just can’t buy off the rack—dwarves, giants, humpbacks.

“Others come because they need guidance. They haven’t a clue. They know they have to dress well because of their station, but they don’t really care and they don’t want to have anything to do with it. They say, ‘Just make me something I can put on,’ or ‘Make me another one just like the last one.’

“I have a client who has ordered exactly the same garments in the same style and fabrics for the last thirty or forty years—a plain navy, a plain charcoal, a blue pinstripe, a gray pinstripe, a Prince of Wales check, and a dinner suit. When I couldn’t find the exact same fabrics, I had to scramble to find acceptable substitutions. A little while back, he got divorced and remarried, and his new wife wanted a say in what he wore. That didn’t last long.”

We are crossing the Harbour Bridge. Below us, commuter ferries leave frothy wakes in the blue chop as they chug past the stegosaurian roof plates of the Sydney Opera House.

“How would you categorize Keith Lambert?” I ask.

“Keith is someone who regards quality as being really important—the main thing. Those kinds of people don’t know much of anything about tailoring, but they can see and feel the quality, and they know it is something they can’t find in ready-to-wear. And they want it.”

John has some clients who defy categorization, including Boy George, Elton John, and the Greek Orthodox archbishop of New York. Then there was one especially devoted and wealthy client who ordered seventy-five suits in the 1980s, to be made over a
period of many years, just to ensure that John Cutler would never have a slack period.

“One thing I really love about this business is that you get to meet and deal with people from all walks of life on a very, very personal basis,” John says. “When you get into the fitting room without your trousers on, it’s a great leveler.”

John operates by appointment only, out of a small carpeted showroom on the sixth floor of an Art Deco building in the city’s high-rise financial district. A nineteenth-century cedar cutting table, purchased by his great-grandfather and passed down through four generations of Cutlers, dominates the space. Positioned in front of a long wall that has been curtained with pleated blue-black silk and illuminated by a bank of overhead lights, it looks very much like an altar—a place for followers to pay homage to the great demigod of ticket pockets and rolled lapels. And now, after crossing the room and running my hand over it, I do feel I am in the presence of something just a little sacred. It was on this nicked and burnished tabletop that John cut the vicuña cloth for Keith Lambert’s coat.

John wants to get a pattern done for a jacket before the end of the workday. He has taken off his suit coat, draped a tape measure around his neck, and laid out a piece of pattern cardboard on the cutting table. He places his T square and makes a series of pencil marks on the paper, then uses a straight ruler to connect the dots. He makes more marks, draws more lines, working quickly, humming and chatting, consulting his notes, measuring, drawing. With every line, the diagram grows more complex—and less decipherable to a layperson like me—until at last he is satisfied that he has drafted an accurate and detailed map of his client, imperfections noted and accommodated for. John finishes
the pattern, and Craig Dyer, the radiologist cum champagne expert, arrives—as he does every Monday—with a bottle.

“I always bring a little something around and have a chat,” Craig says.

This evening he has another reason to be here; the jacket he is having made is ready for a fitting. Craig has chosen Dormeuil’s Jade, the silky and very expensive British-made navy wool woven in West Yorkshire and tumbled in the finishing process at W. T. Johnson, in Huddersfield, with minute bits of jade stone. He slips on the half-finished jacket, which is tracked vertically with long white baste stitches, and stands motionless with his eyes toward the ceiling while John inspects it. The tailor pinches in a little fabric in the back and at the shoulder, smoothing the lapels, picking a bit of lint off one arm. When he is done, Craig turns to see himself in a three-way mirror.

“John,” he says, “it is perfection.”

Like all great master tailors, John Cutler is an exacting engineer, an intuitive artist, and a silver-tongued salesman. He is also often a therapist to his clients—encouraging the timid, propping up the dispirited, and soothing the stressed. (Unlike other professionals who are obligated to be discreet, however, he is expected to cultivate client relationships outside the consultation room, which he does with an Aussie’s characteristic gusto.)

John’s job is to discern what a man looks like most of the time, when he is not in front of the tailor’s mirror. He could tell right away if you had stopped going to the gym or had been overindulging in martinis or meat pies. He could sense when your confidence had flagged or your relationships were in turmoil. He could tell when you had a new love or when things were going great guns at work. It was all about carriage. Posture. Confidence.

John never judges. He measures accurately, and without prejudice. And he always makes it clear: there is no point in trying to suck in your stomach.

“Come on, now, no cheating. Relax or I will have to tickle,” he would say.

John may be many things, but what he is not is a seamster. Though he has the skills to produce a garment from start to finish, the needle-and-thread stuff—the work most people think of when they hear the word “tailor”—is done by a team of four stitchers in a basement atelier seven floors below John’s showroom.

The workshop is a brightly lit windowless room just off the elevator. Rolls of pastel shirting cottons and jewel-toned silks and satins lean in the corners; folds of dark suitings are stacked on shelves. On the worktables, there are scraps of cloth, rulers, scissors, chalk, beeswax cakes, display cards of gold blazer buttons, pillow-like pressing hams, and heavy flatirons. Blazers, trousers, and tuxedo jackets, in various stages of completion, hang on racks and off pegs.

Genaro Scura, bald and bespectacled, with one eyebrow arched inquisitively higher than the other, occupies the area closest to the door. He is wearing dark trousers, a blue-and-white striped shirt, and a necktie. On the wall above his worktable, he has taped photos of Princess Diana, Kate Middleton, the Sydney Opera House, Mary MacKillop—Australia’s first canonized saint—and Keith Lambert’s vicuña coat. At sixty-six, Genaro is the senior member of the team. He is also the group’s designated jacket maker, the title reserved for the most skilled tailors. Jackets and coats are complex, painstakingly shaped and padded garments that require a sculptor’s eye and a surgeon’s hand. The
stitching alone in a suit jacket takes about forty-eight hours; trousers, by contrast, with their simple long seams, can be finished in ten to twelve hours.

Genaro stands up to say hello. He has a pronounced curvature of the upper spine—the “tailor’s hump” that is common among men who have spent most of their lives bent over sewing projects. (The craft has lent its name to other maladies: “tailor’s bunions”—a painful swelling on the fifth metatarsal brought on by the crossed-legged “tailor’s pose” sitting position many once assumed in order to get their work closer to their eyes—and the far more dire “tailor’s disease,” another name for tuberculosis, which swept through sweatshops in the late 1800s.)

The son of a shoemaker, Genaro was born in 1945, in Cosenza, a small village in Calabria, Italy. When it was time to select a trade, his father steered him into tailoring. At ten, Genaro learned how to stitch; at twelve, he went to work full-time for a local tailor. In 1963, at the age of eighteen, he left home and headed to Rome to get experience with one of the best tailors in Italy. It was the height of Hollywood’s obsession with
la dolce vita
. Genaro remembers George Hamilton coming in for fittings.

“I make for him suits, in the blue mohair and the beige gabardine. I still remember,” he says. “Very handsome, very young.”

In 1969, Genaro moved to Australia and started looking for work.

“I saw an ad in the paper for a job with Giuseppe Simonella,” Genaro says. Simonella was an accomplished Italian tailor who had trained at Brioni before moving to Sydney to start his own business. Genaro joined Simonella, and stayed for twenty-five years.

“That’s why I don’t speak so much English. I don’t have to.”

Genaro joined J. H. Cutler in 1995. Now he is just a year or
two away from retiring—and from leaving a gaping hole in John’s workroom. Though the tailoring team includes a young assistant, a talented Daniel Radcliffe look-alike named Rhys Twist, who seems committed to learning the trade, they have found that, in general, interns and apprentices move on after a few months.

“The new generation, they don’t like to take the time to learn anymore this job,” Genaro says. “Too hard, very hard. They need too much time, too much patience.”

“For the money, they would rather go and drive a bus,” John says. “It takes years and years and years of work. The old apprenticeships in England were five years, but when you are finished, really, you were just starting to learn. Five years was just for the technical bits. Genaro will tell you, you learn every day. Every cloth is different, every figure is different. Rhys will learn certain things, but he won’t learn the real thing. He needs someone like Genaro to teach him. And Genaro will be gone.”